


Deepfakes

by Arazsya



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Ghosts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-17
Updated: 2021-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-26 03:42:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30099789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arazsya/pseuds/Arazsya
Summary: The Archives do not want to be destroyed.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood & Sasha James & Jonathan Sims & Tim Stoker, Martin Blackwood & Tim Stoker, Sasha James & Jonathan Sims
Comments: 3
Kudos: 21





	Deepfakes

The Archives are not how Jon remembers them. That isn’t right; he knows them every way they have ever been, from Jonah Magnus’ collection of handwritten miseries to his own, a tangle of suspicion and magnetic tape, but what he finds now doesn’t quite fit with any of it. The shelves, that had been clustered in against walls, now stand separated, white-grey as an old ribcage in the tremulous beam of Martin’s flashlight. The boards underfoot creak in all the wrong places, and there are too many doors for him to trust any of them to lead to his old office.

Jon tries to walk off the pain of a shin barked against a desk that shouldn’t have been where it was, and thinks absently that the apocalypse had been far easier in all the places that he hadn’t been before. It’s less that he hadn’t _known_ them – he is the Archivist, swallower of all the traumas that seep into the surface of the land, and he knows _everywhere_ – and more that he had never trodden the ground there. It doesn’t matter if a city has been twisted and stretched into a metaphor of itself; he can be surefooted over a maze of nightmares, so long as he has no muscle memory for it to make a lie. But this half-Archives has become swollen from eating itself, and the walls that he’s so sure he knows have found new places.

He expects that Martin would have something to say about the avatar who had spoken this broken world into being continually walking into corners and tripping over boxes, but from the sounds of it he’s too busy avoiding stubbing his own toes.

They find the way down more through luck than anything else – the way things are now they might have wandered aimlessly for hours before coming across it. But Jon can almost taste the threat of gas in the air, and there is an irregularity in the floor below his shoes. Below them is an arc of the tunnels, and alongside that, so close that it’s been protected from the turning of the world, is the gas main they’re looking for.

He stops. Draws the lighter from his pocket – his fingers and mind catch on it together, for once. It’s time.

“I don’t think you want to do that, Jon.”

Behind him, there’s a clatter as Martin wheels around, the torch beam swinging wildly away. Jon barely moves – just lets the sudden heaviness take him, shoulders slumping and body swaying in search of something to crumple against.

He recognises that voice. Had listened to it for hours, in the broken sanctuary of Daisy’s cabin. Before that, sitting alone in the Archives and clinging to the pain of it as he splintered. This is a perfect imitation, no stuttering half-mechanical syllables stitched together by a program that doesn’t know what it’s doing. The intonations are all perfectly placed, and aim to wound.

“Who are you?” Martin demands, sharp and shrill and clearly ready to use his flashlight as a bludgeon. “What do you want?”

“You don’t recognise me.” It’s a statement, not a question, but there’s still a beat of hurt in it – Jon feels that, too, hard enough that threatens to drive him to his knees.

“Can’t be that.” The second voice comes from somewhere past Jon, and he manages to lift his head, blinking into the dark for detail from the silhouette. “You’re _unforgettable_.”

That one, Martin remembers – he lets out a noise like a struck animal, more pain in it than anything he’d uttered in Annabelle’s clutches. Jon swallows, gathers himself, and leans down to open the trapdoor.

A hand touches lightly at his shoulder, stops him as completely as a blow would have.

“Come on, Jon,” Tim says. He shifts, tracing his fingers down, over Jon’s wrist, to where he holds the lighter – Jon’s grip tightens reflexively, expecting to feel it yanked away, but Tim doesn’t. “You know this isn’t right.”

“Tim…” Martin hesitates, and Jon can hear unspoken volumes falling away from his lips, the instant that he decides it’s not the time or place to utter them. “It’s the only way. We have to get rid of the Fears, so–”

“It’s not getting rid of them though, is it?” Sasha points out. Jon doesn’t _want_ to straighten, half-turn and look to her, but he does anyway. Martin’s light is wavering between her and Tim, uncertain and halting, and neither of them is quite visible in any clarity. The person looking back at him certainly meets the description Melanie had given him, once, but he has no way of knowing if the hand that has drawn the lines of her existence did so with any accuracy beyond that. It feels right, like it could be. A gift, perhaps, or a bribe. “It’s just funnelling them through into some other reality, where all of this can start over, right?”

“There hasn’t _been_ an apocalypse there yet,” Martin says, but it’s still the feeble excuse it’s always been.

“There hadn’t been an apocalypse yet when _I_ died,” Tim points out – he steps past Jon, his touch sliding away as he moves towards Martin. Thinks he can convince him, maybe – he would have, once. Gone to Martin where he couldn’t to Jon, and it’s impossible to tell past the aching in his throat if that’s Tim or just the Archives understanding that Martin is the way to him. “Or Sasha. Or Danny. It’s not _nothing_ , sending the Fears through – it’s going to hurt so many people. Jon – you know that.”

“You’re not real,” Jon says, flat and dusty as the earth inside the coffin, and nothing in it that he can seize upon to believe. “I don’t need to argue with _echoes_.”

“H–how not real are they?” Martin takes an uncertain step back, and almost pitches himself over a poorly-placed chair. Tim steadies him, the way Tim would have – like it’s natural, inconsequential, though the contact has Jon quelling a flinch and a rush forwards. “Because they seem really…”

“ _Mar_ tin,” Tim says, a fond smile in his voice that finds roots in Jon’s chest before he can push it out. “Of course it’s me!” He stays close, tone dancing like it hadn’t since before Prentiss. “Want me to prove it?”

“They’re an extrapolation,” Jon tells Martin, speaking resolutely and only to him, but eyeing Sasha as she begins to edge slowly towards him. Divide and conquer, he assumes, and glances towards the trapdoor again. “The Archives. Trying to protect itself. Using their shapes.”

“What _is_ real, anyway?” Sasha asks him, holding up her hands up as if in a promise that there’s nothing to fear. “You thought that _thing_ that wore my name was real. I have all my memories. What does it matter that I’m not technically alive?” She sounds as she always had when they had talked, a lifetime away, little academic discussions about pronunciations and filing systems that had made him feel like he belonged. “You could stay, you know. We can work together again. I know you missed me as much as you could.”

Behind her, Martin’s light abruptly skews, up towards the ceiling – Jon tenses, letting self-directed fury ignite, because he should _never_ have assumed that he could trust these phantoms as he could have his assistants – but then he sees. Tim – the _shape_ of Tim – has wrapped his arms around Martin, pulling him into a hug that is so much softer than the pointed, pained angles of the one they’d shared before the House of Wax.

Martin’s face, awkwardly illuminated from one side, is stricken, and then Jon loses sight of it as he buries it in Tim’s shoulder.

“You don’t _have_ to doom any _other_ worlds,” Tim murmurs. “Stay here with us. Shuffling the pain around isn’t saving _anyone_.”

“Jon…” Martin trails off, muffled anyway. Jon tries to fill in the rest of the sentence, can’t decide how he wants it to go. Some stalwart insistence that he just _do it_. Doubt. Anything he could seize on to take the decision of what to do and make it shared. After all, it’s not as if Tim and Sasha are _wrong_.

But Martin can’t. From the way he holds Tim back, Jon knows. It’s not just the Archives now, not just those nameless, faceless other worlds. It’s Tim, and Sasha, whose lives he’d spent so many midnight hours trying to spool out from the web they’d been caught in, picking over the ways he could have saved them.

Jon would say that he can’t, either. Can't make Martin the last again. Can’t destroy this last temple to Sasha’s memory. Can’t lose Tim to fire a second time. He’d rather flee, but he’s sure the place won’t let him.

The decision, though, is made. He has felt all the suffering of the apocalypse that he had brought, could name each soul caught in its unending circles. They had agreed to save them, together.

“I’m sorry,” Jon whispers, unsure which of them he’s speaking to, if it’s any of them. Sasha quickens her pace, eyes widening, but he’s faster. He pulls the trapdoor open, and before he plunges down into the dark, he makes sure that the last thing he sees is his assistants.

He’ll give Sasha time to get back to Tim and Martin, he decides, before he dooms them all again.


End file.
